Last week's announcement that Michael Christie would step down as music director of the Colorado Music Festival should have struck the summer event's loyal patrons as a disappointment, but not as a surprise.

Considering what has gone on in his professional life for the past several years, it's actually a wonder Christie has stayed as long as he has -- 12 years of glorious summers, with two more to follow.

I've written so much about the CMF that it is sometimes a challenge to find anything new to say. But I can't let this opportunity escape. And this column is not really about the CMF itself, except as a mere setting.

This is about a turnaround nobody saw coming in 2001. This is about how somebody in his mid-20s was able to win over the crustiest of purist curmudgeons -- and lure in the most unlikely souls who didn't know Beethoven from Bon Jovi. It's about seeing teenagers and schoolchildren experiencing the joy of live music at an event that had gained a reputation as a geriatric pursuit. It's about a lesson for all those who are resigned to the tired canard that classical music is dead, or dying, that the symphony orchestra has no future.

In short, it's about the man and, yes, the eventual legend.

I was around in the summer of 2000 when the festival was conducting its search for founder Giora Bernstein's replacement. Certainly I was no newspaper writer at the time, just a random graduate student who might do a pre-concert lecture or two.

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Michael Christie was the last of the four finalists to present his two programs. And I didn't like him. I thought Christie was the worst candidate. I don't think I've ever told him this before. I don't have to confess this, but I think it's time.

The reasons are kind of hazy. I think it had to do with his age, and maybe some jealousy -- I'm about three years older than he is, after all. There were things about his audition programs I didn't like, too insignificant now to list specifically. I didn't think he was serious. One of the other candidates, by for example, had just conducted "Also sprach Zarathustra," the wild tone poem by Richard Strauss -- from memory!

A few months later, Christie was hired to das the CMF director. Still skeptical, I gave his first season, summer 2001, a chance.

It wasn't a perfect season. There were some decisions that I -- a purist at age 30 -- found questionable. Some contemporary pieces I didn't quite get.

Theme weeks that seemed like gimmicks.

But I still attended. I went to hear Beethoven, some unknown Mozart, some interesting pianists.

The big news that season was the festival's dire financial predicament. At one of the last concerts, Christie announced his donation to save the summer gem. I think that is what finally hooked me.

It was a couple of years later, in 2003, that I began writing for the Camera under the tutelage of Wes Blomster. I'll never forget that summer. I began to get to know Michael Christie as a human being, as a kindred soul whose love for music was infectious, who was now a confident master of the podium, whose programs were daring and bold -- and whose audiences were becoming steadily larger and younger.

I reviewed that whole season while learning how to write about classical music for a mass audience. His programs made it easy. Almost every one was a revelation.

In the years that followed, I was always surprised at the ease with which I could speak with him about music; how I would make suggestions and he would actually take them seriously, sometimes even following them; how his thought process in constructing programs and seasons took literally every variable into consideration.

And then, in 2008, he took it even further. He introduced the mini-festivals, weeklong programs that would explore a composer's output, an instrument's repertoire, an orchestra's brilliance. Christie never hesitated to challenge his excellent musicians, and despite his often-massive demands, I honestly have no memory of something going completely and totally wrong on the Chautauqua stage. If it did, the most perceptive among us didn't notice.

It's difficult to imagine what the festival will be like without him. It was his first appointment as music director, and we'll always know that he started his career here. We'll never doubt that he was obsessed with giving us the best entertainment and the most transcendent performances he could possibly deliver.

But for many reasons, it is time for him to move on. And we can; we must accept it. We'll miss his "intermission insights," his gimmicks that work, his loyalty to all of us.

But somebody new will come, and the festival will go on. His shoes will be filled, and his successor will surely keep the flame aloft. We will establish a relationship and follow that successor's vision with trust and hope.

In the meantime, we still have Boulder's other loyal maestro, Michael Butterman, to carry the torch and provide continuity at the resurgent Boulder Philharmonic.

But we will never have another Michael Christie.

To close, I would like to make a personal request of Christie. Through the years, he has nearly completed a cycle of Mahler symphonies (minus the Eighth, which can't be played at Chautauqua). As a devotee of that composer, I must ask Christie to not leave before he completes that cycle by playing the Ninth.

That valedictory work might be a bit heavy to end the tenure of the Happy Maestro. But it will certainly express our hopeful anguish as he departs.

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